This talk will be an introduction to doing "hardware stuff" stuff, for people accustomed to plying their trade against software. I will discuss how to build tools (and use existing tools) to sniff/spy on a variety of hardware communications channels from UART Serial (the kind in your computer) to the very ubiquitous SPI/I2C serial busses used in virtual everything (from EEPROM in your portable DVD player to the HDMI/VGA cables between your computer and monitor). I will demonstrate how these simple hardware taps can be used to begin reverse engineering, spoofing, and fuzzing in places where (as a software person) you might not have previously felt comfortable. I will be bringing along a number of custom hardware and software tools (used specifically for these purposes) as well as a mock lab environment for demonstrations. Other than these practical skills, I am new to this "hardware stuff" so please don't expect a "embedded-JTag-SCADA-mobile" buzzword soliloquy. I'll just be sharing some stories and showing some neat hardware and software I've recently found useful.

This talk will be an introduction to doing "hardware stuff" stuff, for people accustomed to plying their trade against software. I will discuss how to build tools (and use existing tools) to sniff/spy on a variety of hardware communications channels from UART Serial (the kind in your computer) to the very ubiquitous SPI/I2C serial busses used in virtual everything (from EEPROM in your portable DVD player to the HDMI/VGA cables between your computer and monitor). I will demonstrate how these simple hardware taps can be used to begin reverse engineering, spoofing, and fuzzing in places where (as a software person) you might not have previously felt comfortable. I will be bringing along a number of custom hardware and software tools (used specifically for these purposes) as well as a mock lab environment for demonstrations. Other than these practical skills, I am new to this "hardware stuff" so please don't expect a "embedded-JTag-SCADA-mobile" buzzword soliloquy. I'll just be sharing some stories and showing some neat hardware and software I've recently found useful.

Stephen Ridley

Stephen A. Ridley is a security researcher with more than 10 years of experience in software development, software security, and reverse engineering. Before becoming an independent researcher, Mr. Ridley served as Senior Researcher at Matasano. Prior to that: Senior Security Architect at McAfee, and before that he worked at a major U.S. Defense contractor supporting the U.S. intelligence communities. He has spoken about reverse engineering and software security at BlackHat, ReCon,EuSecWest, Syscan and others. Mr. Ridley currently lives in Manhattan and frequently guest lectures at New York area universities such as NYU and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.


This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Producer: Recon
Audio/Visual: sound
Keywords: Recon; Hardware; Reverse Engineering

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

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